Five questions to ask your coach when something isn't working

Every player who takes lessons will hit a stretch where the lessons stop producing anything. The forehand you were working on is not getting better. The serve toss is still low. The backhand return still breaks down when the pace goes up. You know something is wrong. You cannot quite say what.

The default response is to change coaches. Sometimes that is the right move; more often the coach is not the problem, and the conversation you should have been having with them for the past six months is.

Change your coach or keep them: we think that the right next move is the same either way. Film your next session and upload it at allcourt.club/join, and a touring professional from the All Court network will watch it back. A pro reviewing a video sees what a coach standing across a live rally cannot always catch: the nuance a rewind reveals, the tendency the naked eye smooths over, the mechanism that only slow motion makes visible. Take the reading into your next lesson and use it to ask the coach you already have the five questions below.

Here are the five worth having ready so that the next time you walk off court you are not necessarily an hour older and none the wiser.

1. "What have you actually seen change in my game in the last three weeks?"

This is the question that separates the coach who has been watching your specific game from the coach who has been running a generic pattern of drills at you. From your side of the net the two often look identical.

A coach who has been watching should be able to answer in specifics. Something like: "Your ball toss is landing about six inches further forward than it was, which is helping the first serve; your unit turn on the backhand is starting a beat later than it was three weeks ago, which is why you are late on returns." That is a coach with a textured, real read of your game.

A coach who cannot answer the question, or who answers it in generalities ("your forehand is looking cleaner"), has been running a generic pattern of drills at a specific player and calling it teaching.

2. "When you watch me miss, what specifically are you seeing wrong?"

Missing a shot has a mechanism. It is a grip too tight at contact, a shoulder that closed too early, a contact point six inches deeper than it should have been, a split step that occurred after the ball traversed your side of the net, instead of when the opponent struck the ball. A good coach can name the mechanism.

Most players are used to hearing "the forehand is off" and taking that as the diagnosis, when it is only a description of the symptom. The mechanism underneath, which is what a coach is actually being paid to name, is what turns a lesson into something a player can practice on their own between sessions.

If you ask this question and the answer is a mechanism, the coach is doing their job. If the answer is another description of the symptom, the lesson series so far has been an hour of hitting balls without a diagnosis, and the plateau you are on has been the natural conclusion of that arithmetic.

3. "What's the one thing you would fix first if you were me?"

This question forces triage. Every club player has three or four things going wrong at any one time, and every good coach knows that fixing three or four at once will fix none of them.

The "if you were me" framing also flushes out the coach's actual priority rather than the polite one, and the gap between those two answers is the point of the question. A coach who can pick a single thing and explain why they picked it over the other three is a coach thinking about your development. A coach who says "well, all of these things matter" is telling you they have not decided, which means the lesson plan will keep shifting and the practice pattern will not compound.

4. "What am I asking you to fix that isn't actually the problem?"

This is the sharpest question of the five. It inverts the transaction. Instead of asking the coach to solve what you have brought them, it asks the coach to tell you which of your framings are wrong.

It matters because many plateaus occur when a player has been working on the wrong thing for months. The forehand is not the problem; the recovery step is. The serve is not the problem; the ball toss under pressure is. The backhand return is not the problem; the return position is. The coach has probably seen this. The coach has probably not said so, because you were the one who set the agenda when the lesson began, and coaches, like most professionals, are inclined to help clients with the thing the client has named.

Asking the question directly gives the coach permission to reframe. Some will decline, which tells you the coaching relationship has been transactional rather than diagnostic. Others will look relieved and say something like "I have been meaning to raise this," which is the moment you can both exhale, look each other in the eyes, and work together.

5. "What should I be doing between now and our next lesson?"

This is the homework question, and it tests whether the coach is thinking in weeks or in singular hours.

A coach thinking in singular hours will say something like "just keep practicing what we worked on today". This is a coach who assumes the lesson is the unit of improvement, which is a lucrative model for the coach and a slow one for the player. A coach thinking in weeks rather than unit economics will name two or three specific things: a drill you can do on your own with a basket of balls, a movement pattern to build into your warm-up, a check on your grip that you can run before you serve at your club match on Saturday. Those items become the architecture of the week, and the next lesson has something to build on rather than a set of half-forgotten cues to reintroduce.

The homework question also tests how much of your improvement the coach thinks depends on their being there for it. A coach who thinks it is less than you would expect is a coach betting on you rather than on the lesson slot. The economist John Kay would call this obliquity: the counter-intuitive rule that a career built on reducing the player's dependence on the coach pays better across decades than one built on maximising the hourly rate today.

What the questions actually diagnose

The five questions are ostensibly about your game; in practice they are diagnostic of your coach as much as your tennis. The coach who answers all five quickly and with specifics is a coach whose lessons compound. The coach who cannot is telling you the relationship has been running on autopilot for a while, which is where progress goes quietly missing. A companion piece we published a couple of months ago, what good coaches actually do in the first ten minutes of a lesson, is the same conversation from the coach's side of the net, and worth reading alongside this one.